I have been running a home server for a couple of years now. It is extremely useful for me. It is also one of my favorite personal hobbies. The glue of that home server is a Supermicro X10SLL-F motherboard . So far, that motherboard has performed wonderfully without missing a beat. Day-to-day, my only gripe with it is that the power draw is slightly higher than I would like, but I can live with a few extra watts. However that supermicro motherboard has a terrible “gotcha.” The IPMI out-of-band/remote management software has a nasty bug. I recently changed the admin password from the default “admin,” like any diligent sysadmin should (Yes I know that I should have changed it much sooner, but in my defense, the IPMI was only accessible on my local network).
As it turns out all IPMI passwords are limited to 19 characters and if one tries to use a password longer than 19 characters, the IPMI software will just…silently truncate the password to 19 characters. I thought I locked myself out of IPMI and had no choice to factory-reset the IPMI!!
I have no idea how I would have found this out without Reddit (incidentally while trying to find out how to factory-reset the IPMI). This is HORRIBLE behavior. I imagine this is changed in newer motherboards/IPMI firmwares, but this motherboard hasn’t received firmware updates in years. That is one pitfall of running old used enterprise server parts. But there really is no excuse for silently truncating a password I entered while creating the password…AND NOT TRUNCATING THE PASSWORD WHEN I ENTER IT TO LOG IN.
Anyone who uses an old Supermicro motherboard, e.x. X10 series, should make their IPMI passwords <= 18 characters. If you accidently made your IPMI password longer and are stuck, try logging in with the first 19 characters of your IPMI password.
To be fair, I don’t use this IPMI for much. I only use the IPMI from my local
network (with no VPN tunnel from the outside world) when I have messed up my
network firewall and need to drop some
iptables
rules manually as root.
Once my network firewall was stable enough, I stopped using the IPMI.
ssh
serves all of my needs that
IPMI would typically address during “normal” server operation.
Overall, one strike in two years of usage is not bad at all. This supermicro X10-series motherboard is on pace to get its third strike around the time when I might want to fully upgrade the system, including the motherboard.